Displaying items by tag: fake news

So Nancy Pelosi wants to put President Trump in prison? And Robert Francis O’Rourke says it’s time to impeach the President?

And the rest of the 2020 Democrat clown show thinks that Americans—like you and me—hate the President?

Ummmmmm.

Let me tell you a story about a chance meeting I had the other day at a Reno, Nevada Jiffy Lube.

I took my daily driver—a 1994 Ford Explorer with about 350,000 miles (there’s a reason Ford has been making vehicles for 115 years)—to have the air conditioner worked on. Reno had hit 90 degrees the day before.

The guy sitting next to me in the waiting room heard me on the cell phone to one of my business associates and asked what I did for a living.

I replied that I was the CEO of USA Radio Networks and he asked what station we had in the area. I replied KNNR, 1400 AM. He replied, ahhh…Wayne Allyn Root’s station. (Also the Vegas Golden Knights' station.)

Then another guy in the waiting room chimed in. Said he watched Root on Newsmax and didn’t know that the whole show (which we syndicate) was available in Reno. (We simulcast the 5-6pm hour with Newsmax, Wayne airs from 3-6pm Pacific.)

Then, the conversation turned to the media, President Trump and the Democrat clown show as these conversations often do. (I have a lot of them, wherever I go, it's a blessing I inherited from my late father.)

Folks, this was an unsolicited conversation in a flyover town which is usually considered a 50-50 split between hardcore conservatives and environmental liberals. A Jiffy Lube waiting room hardly tilts left or right. It’s composed of people getting their cars worked on—as American as it gets in a general sort of way.

Yet, as our 30 minutes of conversation went on, there was no debating anyone in the room. Nobody in that room was against the President.

It was exactly like my friends in farm and ranch country.

When I talk to farmers where I grew up in the Midwest (mostly corn and beans), they acknowledge that the President’s tariff and threats of tariffs have hurt them a bit. BUT! They are with the President because they can see beyond the tips of their noses.

It is the same with most—or all—of my rancher friends.

Put as bluntly as I know how, this is not a President who has no support. He has support in places the Democrats (and their friends in the media) have no idea about.

There are people who have never been west of the Hudson River who seem to think that this President is not in the mainstream of American thought.

There are people who have never been east of the Los Angeles County line who think the same thing.

Unless things change radically before November of 2020, boy, are they in for a surprise.

The very same lamo media which spends 90 percent of its time attacking this President did the same thing in the first four years of Ronald Reagan’s term. They have a very short memory of that today. Especially after Reagan won 49 states in the 1984 election.

He was called a third rate actor and that was some of the nicest stuff. Even faux conservative George Will said things about Americans being “taxophobic” and Reagan’s “Morning in America goo.” Reagan got the same crap that President Trump gets, the difference being that there was no Fox News and newspapers, today, are dying—we suspect at least partially because of their baked-in liberalism.

I’m not predicting a 49 state Trump win in 2020. But then, who predicted that Toronto would win the NBA championship and St. Louis would win Lord Stanley’s Cup? Certainly not the experts.

And before you listen to those “experts” talk about their “polls”, remember that these were the same shameless clowns who had Hillary beating Trump by 7 points ON ELECTION DAY!

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Fred Weinberg is a columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions, if expressed, are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. His column has been reprinted in full, with permission.

Alex Jones, host of Infowars and known conspiracy theorist, had his personal Facebook account suspended for 30 days as a result of violating the social network’s bullying and hate speech community standards.

Shielded review lifts a Facebook page or account from typical moderation by contractors to in-house moderation by Facebook staff, allowing for more careful consideration of the cash at stake. Well, Jones and his Infowars are far more popular than Robinson and Britain First.

Britain First’s Facebook page has just 7,100 likes and Robinson’s personal page has received 834,000 likes. Jones’s personal Facebook page has 1.6 million likes, and his Infowars page has nearly a million. So it stands to reason that if Britain First was subject to shielded review despite its 7,100 followers, then the Jones and Infowars pages would be monitored by Facebook staff and not independent contractors unconcerned with Facebook’s revenue and stock price.

Speaking of stock price, the day before Jones was slapped with a suspension, Facebook’s stock lost nearly 20 percent of its value. As of this writing, it’s hovering around $172 – down from an all-time high of $218.62.

Facebook’s long taken flak for it’s stance on fake news. “Just being false” is not grounds for suspension or even removal of content from the social network, according to its head of News Feed, John Hegeman. But allowing the publication of fake news using a product called “News Feed” is hypocrisy by anyone’s standards. Fake news is not news, therefore news feed is not a news feed. It never was. News Feed has been and always will be a social feed. What your friends’ cats are doing gets just as much attention as the day’s biggest headlines you’re most likely to read.

I can understand why Facebook doesn’t want to moderate the publishing of fake news. It would be incredibly costly to patrol and enforce a community standard banishing the publication of fake news. But publishing fake news is dangerous and has very real consequences, as Facebook knows all too well after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

If publishing fake news isn't against Facebook community policy, the very name "News Feed" is misleading and misinformation in itself. False news is not news, and there's a difference between misreported news and false news. If Facebook is not going to attempt to make "News Feed" an actual news feed, the "News Feed" name should be scrapped for something more representative of the Facebook feed, like "Stories" or "Happenings."

I asked Hegeman, the vice president of News Feed, if there has ever been a discussion about renaming News Feed but received no reply via LinkedIn. It seems that would be enough to get Facebook off the hook for other people's publishing of fake news without having to monitor it. Facebook has an opportunity to save itself a lot of trouble by simply changing the name of something poorly named in the first place.

At least Alex Jones’s Infowars is appropriately named. There is a war over information. It’s just his definition of information that is misinformed.

After several weeks of fake news about iPhone X sales, Apple revealed the truth. It was the company’s best-selling smartphone every single week it was on sale over two quarters. This is the first time Apple’s most expensive model achieved that level of sales.

This comes after all the fear-mongering that people wouldn’t pay for a mobile handset costing $999 and more, depending on the configuration. There were surveys demonstrating that a majority of potential customers would reject the costlier models, which is understandable. But with iPhones starting at $349, it only demonstrated that different people have different priorities and different budgets.

But the iPhone X still led the pack among iPhones. I’m sure this is clear to you.

Now I suppose some of you might be skeptical of Apple’s claims about revenue, profits, and the number of items shipped. But the company is following SEC requirements. Filing false reports could get them in a heap of trouble. Look up companies who have run afoul of that agency.

In short, it’s fair to say that Apple is reporting the truth, whereas some members of the media who have repeated the fictions about poor sales are clearly mistaken, or perhaps deliberately lying.

Some of the fake news about poor iPhone X sales allegedly originates from the supply chain. But Apple CEO Tim Cook has said on several occasions that you can’t take one or a few supply chain metrics and assume anything about sales. Apple will routinely adjust supply allocations among different manufacturers and, in some cases, manage inventory in different ways that will impact total shipments.

What’s most disturbing about the iPhone X is that false reports of poor sales are only the latest in a long stream of falsehoods published about the product.

Even when the iPhone X was referred to as an iPhone 8, there were claims that Apple had to make a critical last-minute design change because they couldn’t find a way to make a front-mounted Touch ID work embedded or beneath an edge-to-edge OLED display. The rumors were based on the alleged reason that Samsung put its fingerprint sensor at the rear of the unit.

Sure, Apple went to Face ID, but that feature was supposedly under development for several years. Regardless of the alleged limitations of an OLED display, Apple may have switched to facial recognition anyway. Indeed, there are reports it may ultimately replace Touch ID on all gear.

Once the rumors about facial recognition became more credible, the next effort at fear-mongering suggested it would present potential security problems, or maybe not even work so well. After all, Samsung has a similar feature that can be readily defeated with a digital photo, at least on the Galaxy S8 smartphone. I’m not at all sure at this point whether there are similar limitations on this year’s Galaxy S9, which supposedly has improved biometrics.

Even after Face ID proved to be extremely reliable — nobody claims perfection — there were the inevitable complaints that the iPhone X would be backordered for weeks or months, and thus, after it was introduced early in November of 2017, you wouldn’t be able to get one in time for the holidays.

Over the next few weeks, Apple managed to mostly catch up with orders. So in the days before Christmas, you still had a good chance of getting one on time.

That’s when the critics began to suggest sales had been underwhelming. Apple’s great experiment in fueling an alleged — and never confirmed — iPhone “super” upgrade cycle had failed.

When Tim Cook announced that the iPhone X was the best-selling iPhone and the best-selling smartphone on the planet for each week it was on sale in the December quarter, the next rumor had it that sales collapsed after the holidays, and March quarterly numbers would be perfectly awful.

It got to a point by mid-April that Apple’s stock price, which had approached $180 per share, plummeted to near $160. You can see the trend over at Yahoo Finance and similar sites.

After this week’s news from Apple that all these unfavorable reports were false, the stock price soared. It closed at $176.57 on Wednesday.

So is that the end of the latest cycle of spreading fake news about Apple? I doubt it. There were similar rumors about previous iPhones, using alleged supply chain cutbacks to fuel such claims. In each case, the rumors turned out to be false, only to return months later in full force.

One would think that, after this keeps happening, the reporters, bloggers and industry analysts who keep spreading this nonsense would learn a thing or to. Then again, if some of it is designed to talk down the stock price, and thus allow the instigators to buy the stock at a lower price before it increases again, you can expect it won’t stop.

I suppose some of these rumors may also have been started by Apple’s competitors. I would hope that the media won’t be fooled by such antics anymore.

Facebook has since taken action, “killing” 30,000 fake accounts in France. It’s also drafted users like you to report fake news, implementing a little button in the upper-right-hand corner of posts to activate the counterintelligence to vet the misinformation.

Facebook doesn’t even have to consider what the trains, planes and automobiles are carrying. The link between spam and fake news and those sharing more than 50 times per day is so strong, Facebook doesn’t even need to consider the content. “It’s one of the strongest signals we’ve ever found for identifying a broad range of problematic content,” Facebook’s vice president in charge of News Feed, Adam Mosseri told Recode’s Kurt Wagner.

The problem is Facebook has to cover its ass and allow for freedom of speech and the press -- you know, those First Amendment rights. So if Facebook thinks you or its algorithm has found fake news and wants to blow it out of the water, it has its counterintelligence team of journalists fact-check the story. Even then, though, Facebook can’t launch torpedoes. It sets phasers to stun and flags the post as “disputed” if two of its counterintelligence communities finds a problem with the news. And while disputed stories don’t show up as much in the sea that is News Feed, they’re still out there -- seeking, and eventually destroying, a gullible target.

Facebook has even taken steps to assist the gullible targets by asking them if they’re sure they want to share the trash upon which they’ve stumbled. Nothing’s stopping that fake news terrorist from tossing that bomb into the Facebook-sphere, though.

The one thing that would make a difference on the fake news front doesn’t seem to be figured out yet. Facebook says it’s going to make it harder for fake news publishers to profit from fake news, but they haven’t revealed how. In their new report, Facebook calls this phase of the battle plan as “disrupting economic incentives.”

There is less than 21% approval rating for the American media. The reason is that people in this country understand that it is nothing more than fake and contrived news! Yet, they remain in the present, continuing to lie and to further their agenda by promulgating propaganda, as well as driving support for Donald Trump, as a leader of the opposition. The more the media attacks him, the more support that he garners.

Those pulling the strings behind the corrupt politicians knew that Hillary Clinton never had the support of the American people anymore than John McCain had running against Barrack Hussein Obama. Sad to say, it took the American people 8 years to figure out that he did everything opposite of what he promised. It was an easy fix.

“How fortunate for governments that people never think.” –Adolph Hitler

I reported earlier this year, 70 years of CIA propaganda and corruption, and how disinformation is exactly what they have been spewing out of the CIA for a long time, not only in our country, but in other countries, as well.

“Taught to lie, to betray the people and not to tell the truth to the public.”

“The CIA gets control over all of the majority of journalists.”

“CIA’s primary mission is to collect, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate foreign intelligence to assist the President and senior U.S. government policymakers in making decisions relating to national security.”

If you don’t believe what he said, then you deserve what you have coming.

What they say that they do and what they actually are doing are two different stories. The fruit of the CIA has been war, world destabilization, media propaganda, murder, bribery, etc. Listen to former CIA agent John Stockwell:

“It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms. ….”

Of course, they have been in cahoots with the military industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned Americans about back in January 1961.

“If you are not careful, the newspapers (The Media) will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

So, how is it that when their favorite politician moves into the White House, all of a sudden, the things that he does, regardless if they are constitutional (legal) or not, as long, (as he has on your favorite jersey) all is accepted? This is exactly what is happening in America. Once again, it’s a different President, but the same illegal and unconstitutional policies and agenda moves forward. However, as long as you like him, that is all that matters. Where have America’s principles gone? (Jeremiah 5:21)

“Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.” –Edmond Burke

Americans must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles (Psalm 119:89).

“For a people that value its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” –President David Eisenhower

There you have it. The same world leaders who have been used to lie, steal, kill, sell their people out and wage war across the globe are in concert praising the new President of the United States of America.

How about holding Donald Trump to his own promises when it comes to dealing with corruption inside our borders rather than dealing with corruption outside America? First things first, after all, isn’t that what Donald Trump promised to do? (Psalm 94:16)

How is it that you now believe the media that has been lying to you for so long? (Romans 1:18)

This is pro-wrestling at its very worst.

Are they now telling you the truth because it is Donald Trump who is the president? Hypocrites! Again, isn’t Donald Trump the one that has called out American media resources as “Fake News Media” and the “Enemy of the American people?” America, this is leading through opposition.

As more troops are sent to another war, remember, it will not be Donald Trump’s young men and woman that will fight that war. It will be our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, neighbors and children that will fight these unconstitutional wars.

“The man who can look upon a crisis without being willing to offer himself upon the altar of his country is not fit for public trust.” -President Millard Fillmore

Alex Jones says a lot of controversial things. Some people call him a fringe lunatic. Some people call him a prophetic patriot. When I see him plastered all over the internet I am not surprised because, well, he says a lot of controversial things.

He is currently receiving wall-to-wall internet coverage about his brand new controversial topic. I am skeptical. I mean, will it be as controversial as Jones claiming the Sandy Hook Massacre is fake? (It’s not). How about as controversial as his claim that the Orlando Nightclub shooting was a false flag attack? (It isn’t). I don’t know, but I hope it’s as controversial as Jones’s claim that Hillary Clinton operated a pedophile ring out of a Pizzeria in a conspiracy so dumb I won’t even bother linking! (Jones apologized and recanted).

No, my friend. It will be far more controversial than all of those combined. And I know this because it’s all over the media. With media coverage this broad, Mr. Jones must have some huge controversial issue brewing! So what is it? Why is the media all up in Alex Jones’s grill?

Because Alex Jones is in a custody battle.

With his ex wife.

Wait. What? But I don’t give a rat’s ass about his custody battle! I thought this was going to be legit!

I know! What am I supposed to do? I work at GCN. Alex Jones is on our network. I don’t want to write about Alex Jones’s custody battle because his custody battle is pretty much none of my GD business. The only people who should be worried about Jones's custody battle are:

Alex Jones.

Kelly Jones (ex wife).

Their kids.

Their lawyers.

Their judge.

Maybe some family and friends but that’s it. That’s the complete list of people who should care. But here we are. And I have to waste my day writing about Alex Jones’s personal business because media vultures love to swoop in for the kill. Especially when “the kill” is mud-slinging non-news like a custody battle!

Hold on! But the coverage isn’t about his “custody battle.” The coverage is about Jones’s lawyer claiming, during the custody battle, in court, “Alex Jones is playing a character … he is a performance artist.”

Okay. Now I see why the coverage is twenty four seven. Alex Jones claims all other news is fake and then admits that his show over at Infowars.com (and here on GCN) is performance art -- which, I gather, is a clever way of saying “fake.” That’s newsworthy. If this is the first time Alex Jones has admitted to something like this. I can understand the coverage.

Except, of course, for the fact that Alex Jones has called himself a performance artist many, many times. Without any coverage. At all. Unless you count mine. That I wrote two weeks ago. In which I cite Alex Jones calling his very own work “performance art.”

To recap:

Alex Jones says, multiple times, on his show that he is a “performance artist.” Zero coverage.

Well, I know you work with him and all, but you can’t defend everything he says. Can you?

I don’t work with him! Stop saying that! Alex Jones has a radio show on the network that I work for. I’ve never even met the guy! And I don’t have to “defend him.” He’s a radio personality. He says a lot of crazy things. As loud as possible. On purpose. For effect. He does it seven days a week. For twenty years. He is bound to get some things right. He is bound to get some things wrong. He is bound to say controversial things. Some of them will turn out to be silly and harmless. Some of them will turn out to be tragic and dangerous.

But I don’t have to defend him. The Constitution of the United States does a much better job of defending him then I ever could. I’ll even go so far as to tell you I disagree with about seventy-five percent of what I hear Alex Jones say. And I will still roll my eyes in your general direction if you claim I am defending him because I “work with him.” I’m not doing it. He doesn’t need it.

But let's get back to the important custody battle!

Well, no. I’m not going to write about his custody battle. "Former married couple goes through bitter divorce and says horrible things about each other" is not news.

So then let me get back to his claim about performance art. I see the easy way out. Alex Jones will claim, “What I say is truthful but HOW I say it is performance art.” Which gives him carte blanche to say whatever he wants and kind of, you know, avoid responsibility.

Okay. Fair enough. He’s not the first person to hide behind the Constitution. He won’t be the last. The Constitution does indeed give him the right to say just about whatever he wants. It doesn’t, however, protect one from consequences.

Take Len Pozner. Len’s only son, Noah, was murdered in the Sandy Hook Massacre. Len has been dogged and harassed by “Truthers.” Truthers, as defined by the totally legit dictionary:

Truther [trooth-ER] noun. Plural: morons.

A soulless ghoul.

A dimwitted slug.

Weak willed sheep.

Someone who believes mass shooting massacres, such as the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School, are staged events by the federal government in order to frighten the population into surrendering their weapons. The victims and their families, truthers believe, are “crisis actors,” people hired by the government to pretend to be bereaved.

And I will only say, “partially.” A person unstable enough to cross state lines and send death threats to someone they think is a “crisis actor,” also shares a hell of a lot of the responsibility. So while I honestly believe Mr. Jones has the Constitutional right to say Sandy Hook, in his opinion, was staged. It’s still a shitty thing to say.

And there have been consequences. And it looks like they happened to the wrong people. Len Pozner does not deserve to have idiots crawling through his lawn looking for proof of “his crisis acting involvement,” or digging through his garbage hoping beyond hope to find the “smoking gun” that doesn’t exist. He certainly doesn’t deserve to be taunted or threatened.

He deserves to be left alone. His child was murdered. It wasn’t fake. There is no such thing as a crisis actor. And if you believe Sandy Hook was a hoax then you’re an asshole.

Editor’s Note: This is not news. It’s not even for-profit news. It’s an editorial, which is an editor’s opinion. News articles are nonfiction works that strive for objectivity, because that’s how you reach the widest variety of people. Only small, local newspapers do this well anymore, and there are fewer doing it well every minute.

The problem in American journalism today isn’t fabrication of the news or biased media organizations. It’s not even biased journalists or an undereducated audience. It’s capitalism. Profit motivates news content in this country, and controversy and sensationalism result in clicks, which result in cash. If I can either please you or enrage you with a headline to earn a click or share, the bottomline is black and the boss is happy. Informing you is unnecessary if I can appeal to your emotions. I probably did with that jab at capitalism, didn’t I? This idea of fake news is not new. I’ve been writing about it since 2012. I just called it Gonzo rhetoric back then.

American journalists have been writing fake news since Joseph Pulitzer sent Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman to make Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days a reality back in 1890. He had already adopted first-person narration in his newspaper articles; now what he needed was a hero.

American reporters want to be heroes involved in the story when they should be flies on the wall. But the readers want sensationalism, too, so that’s what they got and continue to get. This “Yellow journalism” snowballed into a pissing match quickly. The war for readers between Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s Journal got nasty when Hearst started selling newspapers for a penny. Karen Roggenkamp’s essay “The Evangelina Cisneros Romance, Medievalist Fiction, and the Journalism that Acts” explains Hearst’s intentions.

“Making no attempt to discern truth from falsehood, fact from fiction, the Journal published story after unauthenticated story of fierce battles, daring exploits, and – Hearst’s favorite – Spanish atrocities against innocent Cuban maidens” (27).

In 1897, Hearst sent Karl Decker, writing as Charles Duval, to Cuba to free Cisneros, an imprisoned Cuban maiden charged with attempted murder. Hearst’s readers weren’t concerned with her criminal record, though, and ate the story up.

“Hearst encouraged his writers to blend the apparent facts of the news with specific literary vocabularies, creating a meta-fiction that Journal readers consumed voraciously…Hearst created the meta-fiction because he wanted his readers and the government to act, just as his was ‘the journalism that acts'” (25).